Manning Clark

Charles Manning Hope Clark AC , an Australian historian, was the author of the bestknown general history of Australia, his sixvolume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. He has been described as Australias most famous historian, but his work has been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.

Clark was born in Sydney in 1915, the son of the Revd Charles Clark, an Englishborn Anglican priest from a workingclass background , and Catherine Hope, who came from an old Australian establishment family. On his mothers side he was a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the flogging parson of early colonial New South Wales. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, who never forgot her superior social origins, and came to identify her with the Protestant middle class he so vigorously attacked in his later work. Charles held various curacies in Sydney including St Andrews Cathedral, Sydney, and St Johns, Ashfield, where Catherine was a Sunday School teacher. His family moved to Melbourne when he was a child and lived in what one biographer describes as genteel poverty on the modest income of an Anglican vicar.

Source: Wikipedia